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Wednesday, 1 February 2017

Trump’s Terror Travel Ban Must Include Palestinians.

Jews were among those protesting
at American airports against the Trump Administration ban on visitors from
terror-related Middle East countries.

Travel bans against Jews,
specifically Israeli Jews, to Muslim countries continues on a daily basis
without a murmur of protest from the American Jewish community or even from
Israeli Jews. It is accepted as something normal that Jewish Israeli passport
holders are blocked from entering Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, Iran, Iraq,
Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria,
United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

The discrimination does not end
there. Israeli Jews are prevented from participating in international sporting
competitions in these and other Muslim countries. But it gets worse, and more
relevant to the US Administration travel ban on visitors from terror-promoting
regimes. They should seriously consider adding the Palestinians to their
blacklist of terror-supporting regimes.

Remember the Olympic Games
outrage when Palestinian terrorists targeted the Israeli team in Munich in
1972.

Forty five years later Jibril
Rajoub, a leading candidate to replace Mahmoud Abbas as the head of the
Palestinian Authority, chairs both the Palestinian Football Association and
their Olympic Committee. He campaigns relentlessly to have Israel expelled from
FIFA, the world governing body of football, even as he publicly promotes
terrorism.

Rajoub said of Palestinian
terrorists who murdered Israelis; “We in the Fatah movement bless and
encourage them. We consider them heroes and a crown on the head of every
Palestinian.”

Welcoming Sep Blatter, President
of FIFA, on a visit to the region in 2013 Rajoub said that the youth believes
in “the noble values and humane message of sports which can bridge the gaps
between peoples.” But when Blatter had left the area he said on official
Palestinian TV, “I say there will never be normalisation in sports. We will
see no Jews, no Satans and no Zionist sons of bitches.”

Under his patronage there have
been numerous sports competitions named in the honour of Palestinian terrorists
that have killed Israelis. Yet he remains the head of the Palestinian Football
Association and attends FIFA conferences with an agenda to kick Israel out of international
soccer.

If the aim of the Trump
Administration’s entry ban is to stop the infiltration of potential terrorists
into America they have to include Palestinians in their extreme vetting
program.

This is not only based on decades
of relentless terror attacks against America’s strongest ally in the Middle
East. It is also based on a long record of Palestinian terrorism against
prominent Americans at home and abroad.

Sirhan Sirhan who murdered US
Attorney-General Robert Kennedy in 1968 was a Palestinian.

Yasser Arafat ordered the murder
the kidnapping and murder of the US Ambassador and his deputy in Khartoum,
Sudan, in 1973.

Arafat ordered the kidnapping,
torture and execution of William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, by
Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 1984.

In 1985, after Yasser Arafat officially
renounced terror as a Palestinian tactic, four members of the Palestine
Liberation Front threw Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly handicapped American Jew,
and his wheelchair off the Achille Lauro cruise ship they had hijacked
on the high seas.

In 2016, a New York appeal court
threw out a $655 million judgement brought by American victims of Palestinian
terror not because the Palestinian Authority was innocent. On the contrary, the
case was dismissed because the judges claimed an American court has no
jurisdiction over the Palestinian Authority or Fatah.

In other words, the Palestinians
can get away with the murder of Americans and Jews because, diplomatically,
they are untouchable.

They can even get away with being
allowed access into the United States despite their gruesome and patently
obvious connection with terror and the fact that Palestinian Hamas is
designated as a terrorist organisation.

The Taylor Force Act, named after
a US army vet who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist in Tel Aviv
last year was introduced to seek to cut off funding to the PA if they continued
paying monthly salaries to terrorists.

Mahmoud Abbas boasted that of the
$440 Million he receives from the US $46 Million is allocated to support
terrorists who, as a result of American pressure, were released from Israeli
prisons.

Last month, a PLO minister,
Zakariya Al-Agha, told a crowd that the PA has given five hundred and fifty
million shekels ($145 Million) to the families of terrorists killed during the
2014 Hamas war on Israel.

Despite austerity measures taken
by the PA due to the decrease in foreign aid their payments in salaries to
terrorists will be increased by 3.1% in their 2017 budget.

Now they are threatening more
violence should the US move their embassy to Jerusalem.

The Palestinian commitment to
terror only increases. With their embassy threats, they constitute a clear and
present danger to the United States as a Trump Administration looks to renew
America’s ties to its only genuine ally in the Middle East.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy
at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of the book ‘Fighting
Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.’